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This is Deeta Von Teese in her shy and retiring days: It was taken at Maxim’s in Paris during fashion week of 2004 and I’d just started my job as party editor of Harper’s Bazaar. I think I’d been on the chocolate cigarettes again, by the look of me. I always had a party question when I was in …

Four years ago today, shining light, show girl and fellow traveller, Tutu Tedder succumbed to the whims of Mademoiselle Cancer, as Timothy Leary called her when she struck him. Tutu was the inspiration behind not just my novel Trix but behind most of my writing from 1999, when I met her, until she died in 2012 at the age of …

I thought, “Either I’m at the Greyhound bus station in Los Angeles or I’ve come by accident to the casting of a Rhianna video. Luckily, nobody had remembered to pack their weapons but there were a lot of glittery crop tops, big boots, guys in basketball shorts, a Hispanic-looking Madame type in a criss-cross, laced-up-the-side leopard print skirt and black gloves …

The good news on arriving back from the desert was that I was to pick up my repaired sex boots. I call them my sex boots because I wore them all last year while I was researching Sex Drive. I originally bought them to America because they’re the only waterproof footwear I have, but I soon realised they were perfect …

Here is Viktor. He lives in this most amazing Californian commune in the high desert that I discovered three years ago. It’s near Joshua Tree and is known to locals as “Garth’s Place.” When you are doing travel journalism there are two thoughts you have in your head: “God, this is a crap place but I need to pay the …

Here is what they call in Palm Springs, the “Pink Moment.” It happens at around a quarter to six in the morning just before the sun comes up. And then you’re back to yellow and gradually increasing sun glare until around 5 in the evening when you’re back to mellow orange ready for Free Sangria time. In PS everyone goes …

There is pleasure to be had in washing in a bucket and sleeping in a Little House On The Prairie-style metal shipping container in the middle of the desert, but there’s also pleasure to be had in checking in at a hotel in Palm Springs. Not only can you flush the loo paper down the loo here at the Monkey …

It is day seven of my Little House On the Prairie experience In the Mojave desert. It has been freezing cold and windy and as you can see, I am in fullest Grizzly Adams mode. Still, guests came around yesterday to Olivia’s house. A couple in their early 60s, Rob(erta) and Bill who live in the Joshua Tree area. Olivia …

I’m the new Erica Jong, apparently. I was hoping for the new Female Eunach. Still, can’t complain! Thanks to the BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4hdNbSQRVnn1FJLyC91BmyS/sex-drive-usa-on-the-road-to-sexual-discovery-with-stephanie-theobald

I’m feeling very Georgia O’Keefe here in the Joshua Tree desert all alone while Olivia, Aldous Huxley’s niece, has gone off for a few days. Here’s the view from my desk: Actually, I’m not that Georgia O’Keefe. She almost certainly never spent the day writing a story for the Sunday Times about being a guinea pig on female “Viagra,” as …